The Competent Organization

About the Book

This book is about how the chief executive—along with everyone else directly involved—needs to think about transforming an “okay” organization into a fully competent one. Everyone would like to have a more competent organization. There is a lot of fairy dust out there about how to accomplish that the easy way. But there is no easy way . . . that works. To customers and other stakeholders, it is the performance of the organization that matters. They could not care less about promises that are only sometimes kept. They expect performance. This book not only tells you how you have to think in order to make this happen but it offers many of the basic tools and techniques for doing so. Making a fully competent organization is a tough go, but it is doable. This book tells you how. It is based upon many years of successful, hands-on experience in creating fully competent—even great—organizations of all sorts and sizes. With this book as your guide, you, too, could have that competent organization you dare to dream of. For the past forty-five years or so, I have been traveling the world doing hundreds of seminars for chief executives. My main contribution, however, has been working “in the trenches” with a few of them to help them make competent or even great organizations. Each is a complex endeavor that has to be customized to the particular organization and its particular executives. I’ve talked about this. And I’ve answered many questions about it. The time finally came to set forth how to think about doing this, as well as how to get started in actually implementing some of the basics. This book summarizes my unique approach to making high-performance organizations and the leadership required to do so. It is dedicated to those courageous and committed chief executives who volunteered to undergo the stresses and anguish of making great things happen. It is likely that I have learned as much from them as they have learned from me. We have been passionate partners in making great things happen.

About the Author

Lee Thayer is a scholar and writer known around the world for his many years of research and publications on the human condition. He has taught or lectured at many of the most prestigious universities in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, and China. He has been a Fulbright professor in Finland, a Ford Foundation Fellow at Harvard, and was twice awarded a Danforth Foundation Teacher Award for excellence in his teaching. His background is in music (composing and arranging), the humanities, engineering, and social and clinical psychology. He was one of the founders of the field of communication as a university discipline, and is a Past President of what was at that time the largest association of human communication scholars in the world. He was also the founding editor of the influential journal Communication, which was devoted to pragmatic insights into the human condition by the top thinkers in the world. His early work consisted of 14 books of research on the connection between communication and the human condition. More recently, he has summarized his long life of research into all matters human and social in such books as Communication: A Radically New Approach to Life’s Most Perplexing Problem, two collections of essays, On Communication and Pieces: Toward a Revisioning of Communication/Life. The present Doing Life; A Pragmatist Manifesto is a summary of his innovative perspectives on this subject for past 60 years. There is also his proposed alternative to the reach of biological evolution into the social sciences, Explaining Things: Inventing Ourselves and our Worlds. He lives in Western North Carolina with his artist/wife Kate Thayer. He is also renowned for his current work as a CEO coach of choice.